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2016 SAM ADAMS AWARD CEREMONY HONORING JOHN KIRIAKOU

KAY CHAPEL, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25
4-5:30 PM

[opening piano music by Tom Dickinson]

4:00 – Welcome to Sam Adams Associates for Integrity Intelligence (SAAII) annual award ceremony by SAAII co-founder Ray McGovern, peace & justice advocate and former CIA Presidential Briefer

4:05 – 4:10 Master of Ceremonies Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan & 2005 Sam Adams Award recipient

4:10 – 4:15 Thomas Drake, former NSA Senior Executive

4:15 – 4:20 Larry Wilkerson, Col., U.S. Army (ret); Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell

4:20 – 4:25 Larry Johnson, CIA and State Dept. (ret.)

4:25 – 4:30 Philip Giraldi , CIA Operations Officer (ret.)

4:30-4:35 Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, National Intelligence Council and former CIA political analyst (ret.)

4:35 to 4:50 Ambassador Craig Murray speech

4:50- 5:05 Joint reading of Sam Adams Award Citation for John Kiriakou by Elizabeth Murray and Coleen Rowley, 2002 Sam Adams Award recipient & former FBI attorney

• [Tom Dickinson piano music] John accepts Sam Adams Citation and Corner-Brightener award

5:10 to 5:20 John Kiriakou acceptance speech

5:20 to 5:25 Ray McGovern acknowledgment and thanks to Busboys and Poets owner and social activist Andy Shallal for generous donation to the Sam Adams Associates

5:25-5:30 Adjournment (Craig Murray)

5:30-6:00 Reception (Kay Lounge)

Nationalism is not the only threat to peace

Experience has raised valid concerns about unity and global democracy as the formula to prevent war and strife. (By Diana Johnstone and Coleen Rowley, published October , 2015, in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Organizers and participants in the upcoming “Creating a Workable World” conference (Friday and Saturday at the University of Minnesota) are undoubtedly sincere. No one wants to live in an unworkable world. The sponsoring World Federalist Movement has historically exercised a strong attraction on progressives, appealing to their generous sentiments and wish for world peace.

However, such a grand, overarching ideal as world federalism or global democracy must be evaluated in light of current circumstances and its track record.

At the end of World War II, it was widely believed that nationalism was the main cause of the horrors that had just devastated much of the world. It was easy to imagine that abolishing nation states would be a step toward ending wars by removing their cause. This sentiment was particularly strong in Western Europe, forming the ideological foundation of the movement that led to European integration, now embodied in the European Union.

In that same period, there was a historic movement going in the opposite direction: the national liberation movements in various colonized countries of the Third World. The political drive for national liberation from European powers — Britain, France, the Netherlands — contributed to establishing national sovereignty as the foundation of world peace, by outlawing aggression. Newly liberated Third World countries felt protected by the principle of national sovereignty, seeing it as essential to independence and even to survival.

But today, 70 years after the end of World War II, experience has provided lessons in the practice of these two contrary ideals: supranational governance and national sovereignty. Not surprisingly, the official voices of the hegemonic world power and its allies tend to cite internal conflicts, especially in weaker Third World countries, as proof that national sovereignty must be violated in order to defend “human rights” and bring democracy. The danger from “genocide” has even become an official U.S.-NATO pretext for advocating and launching military intervention. With disastrous results.

It’s therefore not surprising that Workable World’s keynote speaker, W. Andy Knight, was a supporter of the infamous regime-change war that virtually destroyed Libya, under the guise, paradoxically, of the U.S. and NATO’s “responsibility to protect.” That is not just a side issue: It signals the dirty business of wars and regime-change intrigues currently underway behind the scholarly façade of “global governance.”

We fear that opposing arguments in favor of national sovereignty will probably not be discussed much during this conference. And yet, the European Union has served as an experimental laboratory testing what happens when a large and growing number (now 28) of sovereign states turns over a major part of their rights to supranational governance.

Unified institutionally, the weaker members find themselves dominated by the powerful. Despite decades of speeches proclaiming that “we are all Europeans,” when it comes to the crunch, people revert radically to their national identity. Germans resent Greeks for being debtors; Greeks resent Germans for keeping them in debt. All the more so in that there is no way out.

Elections are increasingly meaningless within the member states, because major economic decisions are taken essentially in Brussels, by the E.U. institutions. This is causing increasing disillusionment and depoliticization in Europe. Europeans take virtually no interest in the European Parliament. They do not feel represented by it, and indeed they are not. Democracy works best in small circumscriptions: Greek city states, Iceland, villages. The bigger it gets, the less “democratic” it can be.

Half a century ago, the functioning ideal was to bring eternal peace to Europe through unity. Today, that institutional unity is creating new divisions and hostility. To put it simply, experience is in the process of killing the ideal and showing why “worldwide parliamentary democracy” may bring more harm than good, at least in the real world as it exists today and will for some time to come.

Diana Johnstone, a Paris-based commentator, is author of “Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions” and “Queen of Chaos: The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton.” Coleen Rowley is a retired FBI agent and former legal counsel.

‘I’m sorry’ for war and fear of terrorism: ex-US diplomat’s apology to daughter

Peter Van Buren is saddened by a post-9/11 America where panic turned us into an engine of chaos abroad, while consuming our freedoms at home. (Published in The Guardian on September 19, 2016, originally published in )

I recently sent my last kid off for her senior year of college. There are rituals to such moments, and because dad confessions are not among them, I just carried boxes and kept quiet. But what I really wanted to say to her – rather than see you later, call this weekend, do you need money? – was: I’m sorry.

Like all parents in these situations, I was thinking about her future. And like all of America, in that future she won’t be able to escape what is now encompassed by the word “terrorism”.

Everything is OK, but you should be terrified
Terrorism is a nearly nonexistent danger for Americans. You have a greater chance of being hit by lightning, but fear doesn’t work that way. There’s no 24/7 coverage of global lightning strikes or “if you see something, say something” signs that encourage you to report thunderstorms. So I felt no need to apologize for lightning.

But terrorism? I really wanted to tell my daughter just how sorry I was that she would have to live in what 9/11 transformed into the most frightened country on Earth.

Want the numbers? Some 40% of Americans believe the country is more vulnerable to terrorism than it was just after 9/11 – the highest percentage ever.

Want the apocalyptic jab in the gut? The army chief of staff, General Mark Milley, said earlier this month that the threat remains just as grave: “Those people, those enemies, those members of that terrorist group, still intend – as they did on 9/11 – to destroy your freedoms, to kill you, kill your families, they still intend to destroy the United States of America.”

All that fear turned us into an engine of chaos abroad, while consuming our freedoms at home. And it saddens me that there was a different world, pre-9/11, which my daughter’s generation and all those who follow her will never know.

There was a different world, pre-9/11, which my daughter’s generation and all those who follow her will never know.

My kids grew up overseas while, from 1988 to 2012, I served with the state department. For the first part of my career as a diplomat, wars were still discrete matters. For example, though Austria was a neighbor of Slovenia, few there were worried that the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s would spill across the border. Suicide bombers didn’t threaten Vienna when we visited as tourists in 1991. That a war could again consume large parts of the globe and involve multiple nations would have seemed as remote to us vacationers that year as the moon.

Even the big war of the era, Desert Storm in 1991, seemed remarkably far away. My family and I were assigned to Taiwan at the time and life there simply went on. There was no connection between us and what was happening in Kuwait and Iraq, and certainly we didn’t worry about a terror attack.

It’s easy to forget how long ago that was. Much of the Balkans is now a tourist destination, and a young soldier who fought in Desert Storm would be in his mid-40s today. Or think of it this way: either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump on entering the Oval Office next January will be the fifth president in succession to bomb Iraq.

Whoever enters the Oval Office next January will be the fifth president in succession to bomb Iraq. When September 11, 2001, arrived, I was on assignment to Japan, and like everyone, as part of a collective trauma, I watched the terrible events on TV. Due to the time difference, it was late at night in Tokyo. As the second plane hit the World Trade Center, I made sandwiches, suspecting the phone would soon ring and I’d be called to the embassy for a long shift. I remember my wife saying: “Why would they call you in? We’re in Tokyo!” Then, of course, the phone did ring, and I ran to grab it – not out of national security urgency, but so it didn’t wake my kids.

My daughter’s birthday falls on the very day that George W Bush launched the invasion of Iraq. I missed her celebration in 2003 to stay at work preparing for the embassy to be overrun by al-Qaida. I missed her birthday again in 2005, having been sent on temporary duty to Thailand to assist the US navy in setting up a short-term base there. When the naval officers mentioned the location they wanted to use to the Thai military liaison accompanying us, he laughed. That’s taken, he said, but you didn’t hear it from me, better ask your own people about it.

Later, I would learn that the location was a CIA black site where the country I then represented was torturing human beings. Looking back, it’s remarkable to realize that, in response to a single day of terror, Washington set the Middle East ablaze, turned air travel into a form of bondage play, and did away with the best of our democracy.

Nothing required the Patriot Act, Guantánamo, renditions, drone assassinations, and the National Security Agency turning its spy tools inward. The White House kept many of the nastiest details from us, but made no secret of its broader intentions. Americans on the whole supported each step, and later Washington protected the men and women who carried out each of the grim acts it had inspired. After all, they were just following orders.

Protocols now exist allowing the president to select American citizens without a whit of due process for drone killing. Only overseas, he says, but you can almost see the fingers crossed behind his back. Wouldn’t an awful lot of well-meaning Americans have supported a drone strike in San Bernardino or at the Pulse club in Orlando? Didn’t many support using a robot to blow up a suspect in Dallas?

Back in the homeland
The varieties of post-9/11 fear sneak up on us all. I spent a week this summer obsessively watching the news for any sign of trouble in Egypt while my daughter was there visiting some old embassy acquaintances. I worried that she was risking her life to see a high school friend in a country once overrun with tourists.

So I want to say sorry to my daughter and her friends for all the countries where we Americans, with our awkward shorts and sandals, were once at least tolerated, but that are now dangerous for us to visit. Sorry that you’ll never see the ruins of Babylon or the Great Mosque of Samarra in Iraq unless you join the military.

Arriving back in the US, my daughter called from the airport to say she’d be home in about an hour. I didn’t mention my worries that she’d be stopped at “the border”, a new name for baggage claim, or have her cellphone confiscated for daring to travel to the Middle East. An immigration agent did, in fact, ask her what her purpose was in going there, something even the Egyptians hadn’t bothered to question her about.

I also wanted to apologize to my daughter because, in our new surveillance world, she will never really know what privacy is. I needed to ask her forgiveness for how easily we let that happen, for all those who walk around muttering that they have nothing to hide, so what’s to worry about. I wanted to tell her how sorry I was that she’s now afraid of the police, not just for herself but especially for her friends of color. I wanted to tell her how badly I felt that she’d only know a version of law enforcement so militarized that, taking its cues from the national security state, it views us all as potential enemies and believes that a significant part of its job involves repressing our most basic rights.

I’m sorry, I want to say to her, that protesters can be confined in something called a “free speech zone” surrounded by those same police. I want to tell my daughter that the Founders would rise up in righteous anger at the idea of the police forcing citizens into such zones outside a political convention – and at the fact that most journalists don’t consider such a development to be a major story of our times.

As I sent her off to college, I wanted to say how sorry I was that we had messed up her world, sorry we not only didn’t defeat the terrorists the way Grandpa did the Nazis but, by our actions, gave their cause new life and endless new recruits. Al-Qaida set a trap on 9/11 and we leaped into it. The prison American occupiers set up at Camp Bucca in Iraq became a factory for making jihadis, and the torture chambers at Abu Ghraib remain, like Guantánamo, an infomercial inviting others to pick up a weapon.

The new normal

My daughter is not naive. Like many of her classmates, she’s aware of most of these things, but she has no point of comparison. What fish truly sees the water around it? And imagine how much harder it’ll be for her future kids. Her adult life has been marked by constant war, so much so that “defeating the terrorists” is little more than a set phrase she rolls her eyes at. It’s a generational thing that’s too damn normal, like Depression-era kids still saving aluminum foil and paper bags in the basement after decades of prosperity.

I’m truly sorry that her generation copes with this by bouncing between cynicism and the suspension of disbelief. It was, in a way, that suspension of disbelief that allowed so many, including older people who should have known better, to accept the idea that invading Iraq was a reasonable response to an attack on America by a group of Saudis funded by Saudi “charity” donations. By now, “well, it wasn’t actually a crime” is little short of a campaign slogan for acts that couldn’t be more criminal. That’s a world on a path to accepting 2+2 can indeed equal five – if our leaders tell us it’s so.

We allow those leaders to claim that the thousands of American troops now stationed in Iraq are somehow not “boots on the ground” or “ground troops”. Drone strikes, we’re told, are surgical, killing only bad guys with magic missiles, and never purposely hitting civilians, hospitals, children, or wedding parties. The deaths of human beings in such situations are always rare and accidental, the equivalent of those scratches on your car door from that errant shopping cart in the mall parking lot.

Cleaning up after dad
If anyone is going to fix this mess, I want to tell my daughter, it’s going to have to be you. And I want to add, you’ve got to do a better job than I did – if, that is, you really want to find a way to say thanks for the skating lessons, the puppy, and that night I didn’t get angry when you violated curfew to spend more time with that boy.

After the last cardboard boxes had been lugged up the stairs, I held back my tears until the very end. Hugging my daughter at that moment, I felt as if I wasn’t where I was standing but in a hundred other places. I wasn’t consoling a smart, proud, twentysomething woman, apprehensive about senior year, but an elementary school student going to bed on the night that would forever be known only as 9/11.

Back home, the house is empty and quiet. Outside, the leaves have just a hint of yellow. At lunch, I had some late-season strawberries nearly sweet enough to confirm the existence of a higher power. I’m gonna really miss this summer.

I know I’m not the first parent to grow reflective watching his last child walk out the door, but I have a sense of what’s ahead of her: an American world filled with misplaced fears. Fear is a terrible thing to be sorry for, and that in itself can be scary.

Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on state department waste and mismanagement during the “reconstruction” of Iraq in We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. A TomDispatch regular, he writes about current events at We Meant Well. His latest book is Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent. His next work will be Hooper’s War, a novel of the second world war in Japan.

This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.

2016 SAM ADAMS AWARD CEREMONY HONORING JOHN KIRIAKOU

KAY CHAPEL, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25
4-5:30 PM

[opening piano music by Tom Dickinson]

4:00 – Welcome to Sam Adams Associates for Integrity Intelligence (SAAII) annual award ceremony by SAAII co-founder Ray McGovern, peace & justice advocate and former CIA Presidential Briefer

4:05 – 4:10 Master of Ceremonies Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan & 2005 Sam Adams Award recipient

4:10 – 4:15 Thomas Drake, former NSA Senior Executive

4:15 – 4:20 Larry Wilkerson, Col., U.S. Army (ret); Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell

4:20 – 4:25 Larry Johnson, CIA and State Dept. (ret.)

4:25 – 4:30 Philip Giraldi , CIA Operations Officer (ret.)

4:30-4:35 Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, National Intelligence Council and former CIA political analyst (ret.)

4:35 to 4:50 Ambassador Craig Murray speech

4:50- 5:05 Joint reading of Sam Adams Award Citation for John Kiriakou by Elizabeth Murray and Coleen Rowley, 2002 Sam Adams Award recipient & former FBI attorney

• [Tom Dickinson piano music] John accepts Sam Adams Citation and Corner-Brightener award

5:10 to 5:20 John Kiriakou acceptance speech

5:20 to 5:25 Ray McGovern acknowledgment and thanks to Busboys and Poets owner and social activist Andy Shallal for generous donation to the Sam Adams Associates

5:25-5:30 Adjournment (Craig Murray)

5:30-6:00 Reception (Kay Lounge)

US Media Ignores CIA Cover-up on Torture

A group of U.S. intelligence veterans chastises the mainstream U.S. media for virtually ignoring a British newspaper’s account of the gripping inside story on how the CIA tried to block the U.S. Senate’s torture investigation. (published in Consortiumnews.com, September 17, 2016)

MEMORANDUM FOR: Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Vice Chairman, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

SUBJECT: U.S. Media Mum On How Your Committee Faced Down Both CIA and Obama

We write to thank you for your unwavering support for your extraordinarily courageous and tenacious staff in (1) investigating CIA torture under the Bush/Cheney administration and (2) resisting CIA/White House attempts under the Obama administration to cover up heinous torture crimes like waterboarding.

We confess to having been shocked at the torture detailed in the version of the executive summary your Committee released on December 9, 2014. We found ourselves wondering what additional behavior could have been deemed so repugnant that the White House and CIA insisted it be redacted; and if the entire 6,700-page investigation – with whatever redaction might be truly necessary – would ever see the light of day. We think you could take steps now to make it less likely that the full report be deep-sixed, and we will make some suggestions below toward that end.

With well over 400 years of intelligence experience under our collective belt, we wondered how you managed to get the investigation finished and the executive summary up and out (though redacted). We now know the backstory – thanks to the unstinting courage of the committee’s principal investigator Daniel Jones, who has been interviewed by Spencer Ackerman, an investigative reporter for The (UK) Guardian newspaper. The titanic struggle depicted by Ackerman reads like a crime novel; sadly, the four-part series is nonfiction:

I. “Senate investigator breaks silence about CIA’s ‘failed coverup’ of torture report”

II. “Inside the fight to reveal the CIA’s torture secrets”

III. ” ‘A constitutional crisis’: the CIA turns on the Senate”

IV. “No looking back: the CIA torture report’s aftermath“

Ackerman’s reporting on Jones’s tenacity in facing down the gorilla CIA makes abundantly clear how richly deserved was the encomium you gave Jones when he left the committee staff in December 2015.

You noted, “Without his indefatigable work on the Intelligence Committee staff, the Senate report on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program would not have been completed, nor would its 525-page executive summary have been released to the public.”

It seems equal praise might well be due to any Snowden-like patriot/whistleblower who “inadvertently” included the “Panetta Review” in the reams of material given your committee by the CIA.

Remarkably, a full week after The Guardian carried Ackerman’s revelations, none has been picked up by U.S. “mainstream” newspapers. Not the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post – not even The Hill.

(As for alternative media, Charles P. Pierce’s timely piece for Esquire whetted his readers’ appetite for the gripping detail of the Guardian series, explaining that it would be “unfair both to Ackerman’s diligence and Jones’s courage” to try to summarize even just the first installment. “Read the whole damn thing,” Pierce advises.)

And so, the culprits who should be hanging their heads in shame are out and about, with some still collecting book royalties and some blithely working for this or that candidate for president. As if nothing happened. Sadly, given the soporific state of our mainstream media – particularly on sensitive issues like these – their silence is nothing new, although it does seem to have gotten even worse in recent years.

The late William Colby, CIA director from 1973 to 1976, has been quoted as saying: “The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media.” Whether or not Colby was quoted correctly, the experience of the past several decades suggests it is largely true. Better sourced is a quote from William Casey, CIA director from 1981 to 1987: “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”

In these circumstances, we know from sad experience that there is no way any of us can get on any of the Sunday talk shows, for example – despite our enviable record for getting it right. Nor does it seem likely that any of the “mainstream” media will invite you to discuss the highly instructive revelations in The Guardian. We respectfully suggest that you take the initiative to obtain media exposure for this very important story.

One additional request: As you and your investigators know better than anyone, it is essential to safeguard the integrity not only of the unredacted executive summary but also of the entire 6,700-page committee report on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.

And, again, you are aware that as soon as Sen. Richard Burr, R-North Carolina, took the gavel from you, he took steps seemingly aimed at ensuring that the full report never sees the light of day. Could you ask him why, as soon as he became chair, he asked the executive branch to transfer their copies to the Senate Intelligence Committee?

Many interpreted that as an ill-disguised attempt to thwart holding accountable those responsible for the abuses. Moreover, if the report cannot be reviewed by those who might be asked to participate in activities like torture in the future, how is it even possible for anyone to learn from the prior unfortunate experience?

The public is entitled to the entire story about the CIA torture program and its lies to Congress, the White House, and to us. Any attempt to bury the fullest investigation of the torture program – an investigation that provides an example of Congressional oversight at its best – would undermine the democratic accountability that is supposed to be provided by the separation of powers.

Furthermore, as you were quoted in the Guardian series, the agency searches “may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities or any other government function . . .”

Senator Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, was exactly on point: “You either have oversight and separation of powers with the checks and balances that come with that, or you don’t. It’s amazing that, once again, no one at the CIA was held accountable.” Consequently, the issue now is not only the cover-up of torture by the CIA but – at least equally important – the “unbridled agency that spied on Americans (including Senate Intelligence Committee staffers) as eagerly as they spied on foreign adversaries,” as the Guardian described it in referring to the Church Committee investigation in the 1970s.

Does American democracy deserve any less than an intense investigation of the CIA’s obstruction of the democratic process in the 2000s?

The Guardian revelations make it still more difficult for the kind of excuses made by those who can hardly pretend to be disinterested observers – former CIA directors George Tenet, Porter Goss, Michael Hayden, for example – who wrote Rebuttal: The CIA Responds to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Study of Its Detention and Interrogation Program, published on September 9, 2015. We published our own (VIPS) critique of “Rebuttal” five days later. And before the final vote on John Brennan’s nomination to become CIA director, we tried to warn you not to trust him.

We believe you will agree that more needs to be done to replant the moral moorings of honesty that must anchor the intelligence profession to which we have given so many years. And we think that one step in that direction would be for you to seize this new opportunity to give prominence to the edifying story of how your committee and its staffers stepped up so effectively to their responsibilities in investigating and exposing the very sad and delicate chapter of CIA torture.

The play-by-play provided by the Guardian series, with its appropriate focus on the top investigator Daniel Jones, has created an opportunity we hope will not be squandered; a chance to tell a truly uplifting story sure to encourage others to behave in similarly exemplary manner.

For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

Jean Maria Arrigo, PhD, member of 2005 American Psychological Association task force evaluating the role of psychologists in U.S. intelligence and military interrogations of detainees (associate VIPS)

Eugene DeFriest Betit, Ph. D., DIA, US Army (ret.)

Thomas Drake, former Senior Executive, NSA

Bogdan Dzakovic, Former Team Leader of Federal Air Marshals and Red Team, FAA Security, (ret.) (associate VIPS)

Mike Gravel, former Adjutant, top secret control officer, Communications Intelligence Service; special agent of the Counter Intelligence Corps and former United States Senator

Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC, Iraq & Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan (associate VIPS)

Larry C Johnson, CIA & State Department (ret.)

Michael S. Kearns, Captain, USAF (Ret.); ex-Master SERE Instructor for Strategic Reconnaissance Operations (NSA/DIA) and Special Mission Units (JSOC)

John Kiriakou, Former CIA Counterterrorism Officer and former senior investigator, Senate Foreign Relations Committee

Edward Loomis, NSA, Cryptologic Computer Scientist (ret.)

Linda Lewis, WMD preparedness policy analyst, USDA (ret.) (associate VIPS)

David MacMichael, National Intelligence Council (ret.)

Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst (ret.)

Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Near East, CIA and National Intelligence Council (ret.)

Todd E. Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (Ret.)

Coleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel (ret.)

Scott Ritter, former MAJ., USMC, former UN Weapon Inspector, Iraq

Peter Van Buren, U.S. Department of State, Foreign Service Officer (ret.) (associate VIPS)

Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA

Lawrence Wilkerson, Colonel (USA, ret.), Distinguished Visiting Professor, College of William and Mary (associate VIPS)

Valerie Plame Wilson, former CIA Operations Officer

Ann Wright, Col., US Army (ret.); Foreign Service Officer (resigned)